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MOOC - The Resurgence of Community in Online Learning

In this presentation Stephen Downes
addresses the question of how massive open online courses (MOOCs) will impact
the future of distance education. The presentation considers in some detail the
nature and purpose of a MOOC in contrast with traditional distance education.
He argues that MOOCs represent the resurgence of community-based learning and
will describe how distance education institutions will share MOOCs with each
other and will supplement online interaction with community-based resources and
services. The phenomenon of 'wrapped MOOCs' will be described, and Downes will
outline several examples of local support for global MOOCs. The implications
for the French-speaking world of distance education will be considered, and
Downes will outline strategies and examples of the use of MOOCs to promote
linguistic diversity.

What
is a MOOC?

Thank you, it is a pleasure to be able to
be here today. [slide 1 – MOOC Wordle]

My objective in this talk is to address how
the massive open online course (MOOC) will impact the future of distance
education, and in particular, strategies and examples of the use of MOOCs to
promote cultural and linguistic diversity.

The proposition I will offer is that MOOCs
give us a new way to understand learning, and hence, a new way to understand
certain types of learning, such as for example learning that supports diversity
in language and culture.

To be clear, my expertise is in the field
of open online learning, and not in the field of cultural and linguistic
diversity. So my talk can only carry the discussion a certain distance. My hope
is to offer a starting point for this discussion.

And I want to be clear that when I talk
about a MOOC, I am talking about a different kind of learning. Most of you will
be familiar with the traditional online course, which is based on the
presentation of content and information, and based on a clear curriculum which
is to be learned.

And the MOOCs you may have read about in
the newspaper, the online courses offered though American universities such as
Harvard and Stanford and MIT, these MOOCs are also examples of traditional
online learning, with content and curriculum.

My understanding of the term ‘MOOC’ is a
bit different; it is derived from a theory of learning based on engagement and
interaction within a community of practitioners, without predetermined
outcomes, and without a body of knowledge that we can simply ‘transfer’ to the
learner.

And my understanding of the term ‘MOOC’ is
based on five years of experience developing and offering MOOCs, from the very
first MOOC, “CCK08”, created by George Siemens and myself in 2008, and run a
total of four time in the years following, to MOOCs in personal learning
envrionemnts, critical literacies, and more.

So, first I will talk about what I mean by
a MOOC and expand a bit on MOOC pedagogy. Then I will talk about the outcomes
of a MOOC and the purpose of offering or taking a MOOC. Then I will address the
relation between MOOC and community, and finally I will make some observations
and offer some examples showing how MOOCs can promote cultural and linguistic
diversity.

[slide 2 – MOOC] To begin, then, with the
definition: The term MOOC as is commonly known stands for ‘Massive Open Online
Course’. That gives us four terms: ‘massive’, ‘open’, ‘online’, and ‘course’.

There have been numerous efforts recently
to define each of these four terms, sometimes in such a way as to result in an
interpretation opposite to the common understanding of the term. To some
people, a MOOC may be thought of as a small, closed, and offline.

In my opinion, we should be relatively
rigid in our definition of a MOOC, if for no other reason than to distinguish a
MOOC from the other forms of online learning that have existed before and
since, and hence to identify those aspects of quality that are unique to MOOCs.
Hence, a MOOC is to my mind, defined along the following four dimensions:

[slide 3 – massive] Massive - here I mean not necessarily the success of the MOOC in
attracting many people, but in the design elements that make educating many
people possible. And here we need to keep in mind that to educate is to do more
than merely deliver content, and more than to merely support interaction, for
otherwise the movie theatre and the telephone system are, respectively, MOOCs.

My own theory of education is minimal. It
is so minimal it hardly qualifies as a theory, and is almost certainly not my
own: “to teach is to model and to demonstrate; to learn is to practice and
reflect.”

Thus, minimally, we need an environment
that supports all four of these on a massive scale. In practice, what this
means is a system designed so that bottlenecks are not created in any of the
four attributes: modeling, demonstration, practice, and reflection.

To offer a simple example: an important
part of reflection is the capacity to perform and then discuss performance with
others. If each person must perform and discuss the performance with a specific
person, such as the teacher, then a bottleneck is created, because there is not
enough time to allow a large number of people to perform.

Similarly, if each performance and
discussion involves the entire class, the same sort of bottleneck is created.
Hence, in order for a course to be massive, performance and reflection must be
designed in such a way that does not require that certain people view all
performances.

You may ask, why would it be necessary for
a course to be massive? Indeed, this seems to run against what we know of
teaching and learning, where we want smaller class sizes and personal attention
from an instructor. And this is quite true, if we think of ‘massive’ in the
sense of ‘mass media’ or ‘mass lectures’. These become ineffective precisely
because they become impersonal.

But at the same time, if we depend on
individual tutoring to propagate and promote any sort of culture, whether it be
the culture of physicists or the culture of francophones, we will find progress
in promoting that culture slow and expensive.

What we are attempting to repeat on a
massive scale in a MOOC is not the delivery of instruction or the management of
learning resources. We are trying to emulate, on a massive scale, these
small-scale and personal one-to-one interactions. It is this interaction that
is the most significant in learning, but also often the most important, and for
a course to be truly massive, it must enable, and even encourage, hundreds or even thousands of these small interpersonal
interactions.

[slide 4 – open] Open – I have had many arguments with people over the years
regarding the meaning of ‘open’, and in my opinion these arguments have most
always involved the other people attempting to define ‘open’ in such a way as
to make ‘open’ mean the same as ‘closed’.

There are different senses of the word
‘open’ in education. The word ‘open’ is a single word in English that
corresponds to three separate words in French:

First, there is the sense of ‘open’ as in ouvert. This is the sense of ‘open
admissions’ in education, where there are no academic barriers to admission to
a course.

Second, there is the sense of ‘open’ as in gratis. This is the sense of ‘open
access’, where there is no fee or tuition or subscription charge required in
order to access a resource.

Third, there is the sense of ‘open’ as in libre. This is the sense of ‘open
educational resource’, where a resource that one has accessed to may be reused
in any way desired, without limitations.

For my own part, the meaning of ‘open’ has
more to do with access to a resource, as opposed to having to do with what one
can do with a resource. The definition of ‘open source software’, or ‘free
software’, for example, assumes that the software is already in your
possession, and defines ways you can inspect it, run it, and distribute it,
without limitations.

But this definition is meaningless to a
person who, for whatever reason, cannot access the software in the first place.
The more common and widely understood meanings of ‘free’ and ‘open’ are broader
in nature, more permissive with regard to access, and more restrictive with
regard to the imposition of barriers.

In particular, something (a resource, a
course, an education) is free and open if and only if:

- the resource may be read, run, consumed
or played without cost or obligation. This addresses not only direct
fee-for-subscription, but also enclosure, for example, the bundling of ‘free’
resources in such a way that only those who pay tuition may access them

- there are reasonable ways to share the
resource or to reuse the resource, and especially to translate or format-shift
the resource(but not necessarily to be
able to sell or modify the resource)

Having said that, as George Siemens and I
discussed the development of MOOCs in 2008, we were conscious of and
communicated the fact that we were engaged in a progression of increasingly
open access to aspects of education:

•first,
open access to educational resources, such as texts, guides, exercises, and the
like

•next,
open access to curriculum, including course content and learning design

•third,
open access to criteria for success, or rubrics (which could then be used by
ourselves or by others to conduct assessments)

•fourth,
open assessments (this was something we were not able to provide in our early courses)

•fifth
open credentials

And by the term ‘open’ we very clearly
intended both the aspects of access and sharing to be included; what this meant
in practice was that we expected course participants not only to use course
resources, curriculum, etc., but also to be involved in the design of these.

Hence, for example, before we offered
CCK08, we placed the course schedule and curriculum on a wiki, where it could
be edited by those who were interested in taking the course (this was a
strategy adapted from the ‘Bar Camp’ school of conference organization and the
EduCamp model as employed by Nancy White and Diego Leal).

It is interesting to contrast our approach
to ‘open’ with the “logic model” devised by James C. Taylorand eventually adopted by OERu which
preserved the openness of resources and courses, but kept closed access to
assessments and credentials.

Such courses are not to my mind ‘open
courses’ as a critical part of the course is held back behind a tuition
barrier. Exactly the same comment could be made of ‘free’ courses that entail
the purchase of a required textbook. Just because some part of a course is free
or open does not entail that the course as a whole is free or open, and it is a
misrepresentation to assert such.

Why make our courses open? Think of a
course as like a language. If a language is closed, it dies. If people are not
allowed to speak it, it dies. To enable people to genuinely participate in the
culture of a discipline, whether it be physics or chemistry or political science,
the content and the materials of the discipline must be open.

There is the danger that a cultural or
linguistic group will retreat into itself in the face of this risk. I look, for
example, at the state of publishing in communities like Finland or Sweden, and
find that open access is very limited, as the publishers imagine that there is
no other place for Finnish or Swedish speakers to turn. But they do turn, as we
know, to open online content in English.

[slide 5 – online] Online – I have noticed recently the phenomenon of ‘wrapped’ MOOCs,
which postulate the use of a MOOC within the context of a traditional
location-based course; the material offered by the MOOC is hence ‘wrapped’ with
the trappings of a more traditional education. This is the sort of approach to
MOOCs which treats them more as modern-day textbooks, rather than as courses in
and of themselves.

But insofar as these wrapped MOOCs are
courses, they are no longer online, and insofar as they are online, they are no
longer courses. So whatever a ‘wrapped MOOC’ is, it is not a MOOC. It is (at
best) a set of resources misleadingly identified as a ‘MOOC’ and then offered
(or more typically, sold) as a means to supplement traditional courses.

For a MOOC to be ‘online’ entails that (and
I’ll be careful with my wording here) no required element of the course is
required to take place at any particular physical location.

The ‘wrapped MOOCs’ are not MOOCs because
you cannot attend a wrapped MOOC without attending the in-person course; there
will be aspects of the MOOC that are reserved specifically for the people who
have (typically) paid tuition and are resident at some college or university,
and are physically located at the appropriate campus at the appropriate time.

Just as being online is what makes it
possible for these courses to be both massive and open, being located at a
specific place makes the course small and closed.

But this does not mean MOOCs cannot include
or allow elements of real-world interaction or activity. Indeed, the best use of
a MOOC does entail some offline
real-world activity.

For example, our original CCK08 MOOC
recommended, but did not require, in-person meet-ups, for example, and these
were held at various locations around the world. MOOCs such as ds106 require
that a person go out into the world and take photographs (for example).

In any online course there will be a
real-world dimension; what makes it an ‘online’ course is that it does not
specify a particular real-world dimension. I will talk much more about this in a
few minutes.

[slide 6 – course] Course – before we launched our first MOOC both George Siemens and
I were involved in various activities related to free and open online learning.

George, for example, had staged a very
successful online conference on Connectivism the year before. I had, meanwhile,
been running my newsletter service for the educational technology community
since 2001. Each of these was in its own way massive, open and online, but they
were not courses.

There is obviously some overlap between
‘course’ and ‘conference’ and ‘community’, and people have since suggested that
there could be (or should be) massive open online communities of practiceand of course there could – but they are not
MOOCs.

There is also some overlap between the
concept of the ‘course’ and the ‘course package’, as in, for example, the
self-paced self-study online learning packages first distributed on paper (and
with audio tapes) by distance education institutions. Here, the overlap is so
great, they are often misleadingly called ‘courses’ instead of ‘course
packages’.

To be clear: I am very supportive of the
idea of massive open online communities, and I am also supportive of the use of
course packages, but the MOOC is a different entity, with its own properties
and role in the environment. But a course is an event. A community is not and
event. A course package is not an event.

And specifically:

•a
course is bounded by a start date and an end date

•a
course is cohered by some common theme or domain of discourse

•a
course is a progression of ordered events related to that domain

Why insist on these? Aside, that is, from
the pedantic observation that if you call something a ‘course’ then it ought to
have the properties of a course?

My own observation is that the creation of
temporary and bounded events allows for engagement between communities that
would not normally associate with each other. Courses are a way of, if you
will, stirring the pot. By creating a limited and self-contained event we lower
the barriers to participation – you’re not signing up for a lifetime commitment
– and hence increasing accessibility.

In a sense, the same reason we organize
learning into courses is the reason we organize text into books. Yes, simply
‘reading’ is useful and engaging, and widely recommended, but ‘reading a book’
is defined and contained. A person can commit to ‘reading a book’ more easily
than to ‘reading’, especially if by ‘reading’ we mean something that never
ends.

Hence, massive open online learning that is
not bounded, does not cohere around a subject, and is not a progression of
ordered events, is not a course, and outside the domain of discourse.

MOOC
Pedagogy

[slide 7 – pedagogy] The way we set up a
MOOC is to define a six or twelve (or even thirty) week course of readings,
each on a different topic, progressing through a domain of enquiry. We also
hosted online seminars, many of which featured guest experts from outside the course.

But there the similarity with a traditional
course ends. We do not require that people study the readings; these are
optional. Rather, what we are saying through this structure is that we, the
course authors, will be studying these materials. And people are welcome to
come along for the ride.

What is important about a connectivist
course is not the course content. Yes, there is some content -- you can't have
a conversation without it -- but the content isn't the important thing. It
serves merely as a catalyst, a mechanism for getting our projects, discussions
and interactions off the ground. It may be useful to some people, but it isn't
the end product, and we certainly do not want people to memorize it.

Let me explain why we take this approach.

[slide 8 – neuronsk] Our thesis that
knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that
learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.
Knowledge, therefore, is not acquired, as though it were a thing. It is not
transmitted, as though it were some type of communication. You can’t ‘promote’
something simply by assembling course packages and sending them out into the
world.

The things we learn and the things we know are
literally the connections we form between neurons as a result of experience.
The brain is composed of 100 billion neurons, and these form some 100 trillion
connections and it is these connections that constitute everything we know,
everything we believe, everything we imagine.

And while it is convenient to talk as
though knowledge and beliefs are composed of sentences and concepts that we
somehow acquire and store, it is more accurate -- and pedagogically more useful
-- to treat learning as the formation of connections.

From the perspective of the course, what it
means is that the process of taking the course is itself much more important
than the content participants may happen to learn in the course. The idea of a
connectivist course is that a learner is immersed within a community of
practitioners and introduced to ways of doing the sorts of things practitioners
do, and through that practice, becomes more similar in act, thought and values
to members of that community. To learn physics, in other words, you join a
community of physicists, practice physics, and thereby become like a physicist.

[slide 9 – language] It is, indeed, like
the learning of a language. It is possible to learn a language in theory, by studying books, as though one
would study Latin. But to learn a language fully it is essential to immerse
oneself in the day-to-day activities and culture of the people who speak it.

Again, it is tempting to say that there are
certain things that people learn when they learn a language, that there is some
content that is essential to being a speaker of that language. The meaning of
words, for example, or the conjugation of verbs. But this is misleading and
wrong.

Dictionary meanings and verb conjugations
are, at the very best, an abstraction of the much more complex set of
practices, attitudes and beliefs common among physicists. Because it is an
abstraction, such a description cannot be accurate, and may actually mislead
people about what being a physicist actually entails.

A person who merely knew the content
supposedly taught and tested for at a language academy would feel grossly out
of place in a gathering of physicists. It's like knowing the words but not
knowing the tune.

So what a connectivist course becomes is a
community of educators attempting to learn how it is that they learn, with the
objective of allowing them to be able to help other people learn. We are all
educators, or at least, learning to be educators, creating and promoting the
(connective) practice of education by actually practicing it.

In practice connectivist teaching and
learning consists of four major sorts of activities (and remember, this is just
an abstraction, not a definition; just a starting point, and not 'content' to
be remembered):

[slide 10 - aggregate] Aggregation - the point of offering a course at all is to provide a
starting point, to provide a variety of things to read, watch or play with.
There is a lot of content associated with the course, everything from
relatively basic instruction to arguments and discussions to high-level
interviews with experts in the field.

The course is composed not only of
recommended readings but also articles, videos and recordings made by course
facilitators, blog posts, images, videos and other recordings made by course
participants, collected tweets from Twitter, bookmarks from Delicious,
discussion posts, and whatever else we can think of.

What we have experienced after delivering a
half-dozen MOOCs is that we have to tell people at the start of the course to
pick and choose what they will read, watch or participate in. Again and again,
we have to stress that there is no central content to the course, that each
person creates their own perspective on the material by selecting what seems
important to them.

Again, if we draw the comparison to
learning a language, it is like telling a person to pick and choose from real
books, real newspaper articles, and real conversations.

From the perspective of the course
provider, what is important at this point is that there actually be a rich range of resources, open and
freely accessible, that can be used by course participants. In any course, in
any discipline, I am looking for a wide range of resources, and encouraging
course participants to do the same.

The key here is diversity. This includes
diversity of format: we want texts, videos, animations, games, seminars, and
anything else, because people prefer to use different media. But it also
includes different languages and perspectives. In any MOOC – and not simply MOOCs designated as French-language, it
would be relevant to include French-language resources.

One of the things I have learned in
learning more than one language is that each language views the world
differently, represents the world differently.

[slide 11 – remix] Remixing - the next step is to draw connections. The idea is to
associate the materials (or parts of the materials) with each other, and with
materials from elsewhere.

There are different ways to associate
materials -- typically we look for some sort of commonality, such as a term,
reference, topic or category. Sometimes we look for a fit, as though one thing
follows from another. There are no rules to association, and part of learning
is to get a feel for what goes with what.

The main point here is to encourage people
to keep track of this. We suggest that they keep records on their computers of
all the documents they've accessed, perhaps with summaries or evaluations of
the material. Or, better yet, they can keep a record online somewhere. That way
they will be able to share their content with other people.

In the course we make some specific
suggestions:

- Create a blog with Blogger. Go to
http://www.blogger.com and create a new blog. Or, if you already have a blog,
you can use your existing blog. You can also use Wordpress
(http://www.wordpress.com) or any other blogging service. Each time you access
some content, create a blog post.

- Create an account with del.icio.us and
create a new entry for each piece of content you access.

- Take part in an online discussion. You
can, for example, join a Google group and exchange thoughts with other course
participants, or use the discussion forum provided in the course's online
environment.

- Tweet about the item in Twitter. If you
have a Twitter account, post something about the content you've accessed.

- Anything else: you can use any other
service on the internet -- Flickr, Second Life, Yahoo Groups, Facebook,
YouTube, anything! Use your existing accounts if you want or create a new one
especially for this course. The choice is completely yours.

What we are encouraging here especially is
a mixing of diverse cultures. We are not trying to create a blend, but to
highlight the distinctive perspective offered by each. You can see here that an
ideal MOOC requires participation
from different societies and different linguistic groups.

People often ask whether there are any
French-language MOOCs and French-language learning resources, and this is a
fair question. For me, though, the deeper question is whether there is any
French-language culture attached to
existing courses.

We saw this in our connectivist MOOCs
through the activities of the Spanish-speaking community, the ‘connectvistas’, who would organize their
own events, in their own language, online and offline, around our open online
course. And their perspective became an important part of our online course, and Spanish ideas and culture became a
part of the subject matter itself.

[slide 12 – repurpose] Repurposing - we don't want participants to simply repeat what
other people have said. Learning is not simply a process of reception and
filtering. It is important to create something, to actively participate in the
discipline.

This is probably the hardest part of the
process, and not everybody will participate at this level (we remind
participants, you get out of the course what you put into it; there's no magic
here).

But it is important to remember that
creativity does not start from scratch. There is this myth that we stare at a
blank sheet of paper, and that ideas then spring out of our heads. But it's
just a myth. Nobody ever creates something from nothing. That's why we call
this section 'repurpose' instead of 'create.'

The materials were aggregated and remixed
online are the bricks and mortar that can be used to compose new thoughts and
new understandings of the material. What thoughts? What understanding? That is
what we are creating in the course.

Repurposing is often a process of translating – taking an idea from one
culture and representing it in the forms and idioms of another culture. This
may be as simple as translating a block of text into a picture, or as difficult
as representing a complex idea in another language.

Part of the reason why I am presenting this
talk in French is to learn French, and this process (this is now my fourth
French-language presentation) has taught me more than years of classes. But the
other part of the reason I am presenting this talk in French is to learn more
about the subject of the presentation.

If you're thinking that this isn't really
very new educational theory, you're right. It is old. It forms the core of the
concept we now call 'apprenticeship', and has been formally described most
recently as 'constructionism' by the people like Seymour Papert.

What this isn't is a short cut. People
learn through practice, and so this practice forms the core of connectivist
pedagogy.

[slide 13 – feed forward] Feeding Forward - We want participants
to share their work with other people in the course, and with the world at
large. Now to be clear: participants don't have
to share. They can work completely in private, not showing anything to anybody.
Sharing is and will always be their choice.

And we know, sharing in public is harder.
People can see your mistakes. People can see you try things you're not
comfortable with. It's hard, and it's sometimes embarrassing.

But it's better. You'll try harder. You'll
think more about what you're doing. And you'll get a greater reward -- people
will see what you've created and comment on it. Sometimes they will be
critical, but more often they will offer support, help and praise.

But even more importantly, it helps others
see the learning process, and not just the polished final result. My ambition
to speak in public in French, for example, was prompted by a talk given by Doug
McLeod to a national conference on learning networks. I could see that
something like this can be an important step in mastering a new skill.

You know this, I don’t need to tell you
this, but I’ll say it anyway: when you speak or write in your own language, in
a public domain, about some topic or discipline, what you are saying is “my
language encompasses that discipline.”

It’s not simply that there is a French
culture, full stop. It is that French culture encompasses physics, and
chemistry, and economy, and even (I’m sorry to say) political science. But
more, it is to say that a part of the
domains of physics and chemistry and political science are formed from, and
informed by, French culture.

The philosophers know this well. Can you
imagine philosophy without the contributions of Descartes and Pascal and Camus
and Sartre and Derrida? Can you imagine philosophy without the influence of the
language on their contributions?

The
Purpose of a MOOC

[slide 14 – purpose] Let me return to the
idea of using massive open online learning to promote French language and
culture.

There is a challenge inherent in the idea
of saying the purpose of a MOOC is to promote culture or that the purpose of a
MOOC is to promote some idea or concept. It ties into the idea that the purpose
of a MOOC is to help someone learn. It is, after all, a course. But purposes are
never so easily transparent.

Organizations have multiple motives when
they offer MOOCs. Thus Coursera, for example, may want to support learning, but
it is also a company that wants to make money at the same time. A cultural
organization may want to promote an idea, but it will also have financial
needs, and will soon search for business models to sustain its online course.

Organizations offer MOOCs in order to serve
other objectives. Cole Camplese at Penn State talks of “providing education and
experimentation.” Keith Devlin refers to “the true democratizing of higher
education on a global scale.”

But people do not take a MOOC in order to satisfy
the purposes of the MOOC provider. A person does not enroll in a Coursera
course because he wants Coursera to make money. Nor does a student enroll at
Penn State in order to give professors a way to experiment on them.

[slide 15 – learning] It is tempting to say
a person takes a course to learn something. But even this can be misleading. Consider
what the founders of Coursera say about most students who sign up: “Their
intent is to explore, find out something about the content, and move on to
something else.” So says Daphne Koller.

Adding tuition fees changes the dynamic, as
does adding credentials at the end of the course. Coursera has learned it can
earn money charging for authentication services, which satisfies both its need
to make money, and a student’s need for a certificate (though at the expense of
no longer being free and open).

Many students would skip the course
entirely, and proceed straight to obtaining credentials, as they do when they
buy a degree from a degree mill.

It becomes clear through reflection that
MOOCs serve numerous purposes, both to those who offer MOOCs, those who provide
services, and those who register for or in some way ‘take’ a MOOC.

[slide 16 – connectivism] The original MOOC
offered by George Siemens and myself had a very simple purpose at first: to
explain ourselves. The topic of ‘connectivism’ had achieved wide currency, and
was the subject of the online conference mentioned earlier, and yet remained
the subject of considerable debate. What was it? Was it even a theory? Did it
even apply to education? Was it founded on real research, or was it simply made
up? We believed we had good answers to those questions, and the curriculum was
designed to lead participants (and ourselves!) through a clear and articulate
answering of them.

As we began to design the course (and in
particular, as I began to use the gRSShopper application I had designed to
support my website and newsletter) it became clearer to both of us that the
purpose of the course was also to serve as an example of connectivism in
practice.

After several years of describing the
theory we began to feel some obligation to demonstrate it in practice. So the
course design gradually began to look less and less like a traditional course,
and more like a network, with a wide range of resources connected to each other
and to participants. And the course became much less about acquiring content or
skills, and much more about making these connections, and learning from what
emerged as a result of them.

We had several participants who were in the
course for the research opportunities it offered (and people like Jenny
Mackness, Frances Bell and Sui Fai John Mak have become voices in their own
right in the field).

Others came with the intent to learn about
connectivism, to supplement their existing studies in a masters or PhD program.

Others joined in to participate in what
they saw as an event, others to make connections and extend their social
network (or as it came later to be called, their ‘personal learning network’).

At least one (and maybe others) came with
the specific intent of discrediting connectivism (and in passing, to call
George and myself “techno-communists”).

Even if we limit our focus to what is
putatively the primary function of a course, to teach, it becomes difficult to
identify the purpose of a MOOC.

Much has been made of MOOC completion
rates, with the suggestion that completion is in some respects tantamount to
learning. However, it could be argued that enabling a person to sample a course
and withdraw without having lost thousands of dollars of tuition is a success.

Moreover, different people want to learn
different things: some about what connectivism is, some, how best to criticize
it, some, whether it even makes sense to their own experience.

[slide 18 – learning] And there are
different senses of learning.

In one sense, to ‘learn’ is to acquire some
knowledge or skill, and it is this sense of learning that is most often
associated with education, and especially formal education.

But there is an equally valid sense of
learning, where the objective is to achieve some outcome or complete some task,
what Rogers (2006) calls “task-conscious learning”. This sort of task-focused
outcome is much more common in informal learning; it is the sort of learning I
do, for example, when I dip into Stack Overflow to learn how to set the value
of a field before submitting an Ajax form.

[slide 19 – properties] It becomes clear
that we cannot assess the purpose of a MOOC qua MOOC by assessing the reasons
and motivations of the people taking them, nor even by assessing the reasons
and motivations of those offering them.

All that can be said is that the purpose is
that it is based on the idea of creating a MOOC. It is based on the idea of
creating an open online course designed in such a way as to support a large (or
even massive) learning community.

That is, it is the properties of a MOOC, and not the content per se, that make it worth creating.

We do not create a MOOC to send a message; the MOOC is the message. So we would not, for
example, create a MOOC in order to support a culture or a community; a MOOC is the culture or community.

A MOOC may be a very good or very poor PR
device, may transmit content very well or very poorly, may advance research a
lot or not at all, all depending on who is using it, how they are using it, and
why.

The
MOOC as Community

[slide 20 – habits] Just as a language is
more than the words and sentences, and a culture is more than clothing and
dances, education is not merely the acquisition of new information and skills.

To become educated in a discipline is to
learn the habits, patterns, ways of thinking and ways of thinking
characteristic of that discipline.

Although we learn what we learn from
personal experience, we usually learn what we learn from other people.

Consequently, learning is a social
activity, whether we immerse ourselves into what Etienne Wenger called a
community of practice (Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and
identity, 1999), learn what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge (Polanyi,
1962), and be able to complete, as Thomas Kuhn famously summarized, the
problems at the end of the chapter. (Kuhn, 1962)

[slide 21 – social (record)]Learning is a
social activity, and that is why the picture of distance learning wherein each
person studies from their own home, supported by a personal computer and desk
videophone, is wrong.

To be sure, there is room for home study,
but people, and especially children, need community as well. It is because of
this that MOOCs in the future will emphasize community much more than is
perhaps imagined today.

It is the creation of this community,
rather than the curation or transmission of any sort of content, that
constitutes the core activity of a MOOC. The content is what we call the
‘McGuffin’ – it is an object of interest, that attracts our attention, but
which could be anything.

For our discussion it is relevant to focus
on two major types of community of significant importance to MOOCs. Both are
relevant to MOOCs, but in very different ways. One is the ‘online community’,
while the other is the ‘peer community’.

[slide 22 – online community] The online community is what we might call
an interest-based communities. They are formed around a topic of interest, a
profession, or a domain. They are similar to Etienne Wenger’s ‘communities of
practice’, though I think that my own sense of the concept may be wider than
Wenger’s.

Interest based communities are collections
of people who, although they may be geographically dispersed, share a common
location on the internet. This location is created and defined by the shared
interest people have with each other.

Now, to be clear: this shared interest may
have to do with an offline interest. Indeed, most of them are. So online
communities form around offline activities such as hockey or baseball,
real-world pursuits such as business or biology, around hobbies and crafts, and
even around a town, village or high school.

We see these everywhere. Gardeners hang out
at gardenweb. Computer geeks hang out at Wired. Educational technologists have
found a home in the Google+ Ed Tech group. Across the internet, thousands of
topic-specific communities have been formed, some around websites, some in
social networking services, some using tools like WordPress or Skype.

With today’s focus on MOOCs and social
networking sites (such as Facebook and Google+) the discussion of community per se has faded to the background. This
perhaps resembles the way corresponding community networks have been swallowed
and anonymized by these branded commercial services.

Online educators will find themselves
building interest based communities whether they intend to do this or not,
because the mechanics necessary for the creation of an online topic based
community are present in the structure of almost any online course.

In order to create a online based
community, one only needs a topic, a group of geographically dispersed people
interested in that topic, and a means of shared communication, such as a
discussion list or online chat.

What will change in the future is that
online educators will better learn how to foster and nourish online
communities. They will want to do this
because, the greater the dedication to the community, the greater the
dedication to learning, since learning is the shared experience which defines
this community.

This is what connectivism brings to the
table. This is what MOOCs bring to the table.

[slide 23 – community of practice] The
factors which contribute to a successful online community are to some degree
known, though that said much more empirical data needs to be collected. But in
general, one of the keys is ownership. By that, what I mean is that the members
of the community play a key role in shaping the community. For a community is
not a broadcast medium.

It is not a place where the organizer provides
material and the members consume it. It is a shared and constructed
environment, where the members along with the organizers play roughly equal
roles in content creation.

Wenger’s characterization is informative.
Communities form around a topic of interest – the ‘domain’. They engage in
community activities – as he says, “members engage in joint activities and
discussions, help each other, and share information.” And they share a practice
– a repertoire of resources, a vocabulary, common stories, common
methodologies, common ways of approaching a problem. (Wenger, Communities of
practice: a brief introduction, 2004)

Learning in the community of practice takes
the form of what might be called ‘peer-to-peer professional development
activities’. Rather than formalized learning, members help each other directly.
We discovered this in Alberta when we studies how professional town managers
learn: we discovered they call each other up on the telephone. (Stefanick &
Lesage Jr., 2005)

In an educational context, what this means
is that a lot of the learning - and learning materials - will be those
constructed by the students themselves. We begin to see this with the use of
discussion lists in online courses, but also in the creation of topic-based web
pages (and other resources).

MOOCs – at least the way we create MOOCs –
build on this. The MOOC is for us a device created in order to connect these
distributed voices together, not to create
community, not to create culture, but
to create a place where community and culture can flourish,

[slide 24 – community] The peer community by contrast almost by
definition cannot be formed over the internet. These are the communities that
form in our neighborhoods, at church or schools, or in the community centre,
the tavern or the grocery store.

They will exist because people need a pat
on the back, a (physical) shoulder to lean on, a drinking buddy, an opponent to
play squash, somebody whose physical presence, for one reason or another,
matters.

And they need a physical environment, which
may include sports facilities, an industrial arts shop, a gym, a golf course,
or even just a field with four bases and a baseball or flat sheet of ice and a
puck.

They are first created through proximity,
being composed of people who live in the same neighborhood or who go to the
same school. Over the longer term, we may say, they are just people who meet by
happenstance, and find an affinity for each other.

While online communities depend on a topic
or area of interest to exist, peer communities can be topic neutral; even if
members share an interest in sports or science, it is physical proximity which
causes the community to exist.

[slide 25 – playing] While online
communities are topic-based, peer communities are activity based. An online
community may convene to talk hockey, while a peer community will convene to
play hockey. Online community may consist of your friends. Peer community
consists of your neighbours.

This creates great variety in membership. One
person may be a scientist while another may be an artist. While online
communities consist of geographically dispersed members, peer based learning
communities exist in some particular geographical location.

A peer learning community will be that
group of people attending a particular school or learning centre. People become
members of the community because of a shared location, workplace, cultural
background, religion, or language, and because of shared experiences in online
learning.

While people in a topic based community,
for example, will discuss this or that monograph or expert in the topic, people
in a peer based learning community will discuss this or that institution,
interface software, or community events.

Peer learning communities are vital to
learning because they provide a safe environment in which to learn. A person
does not feel adrift on the internet when working in a community of people
facing similar needs and challenges. Though each may be pursuing a different
educational goal, their overall objective and means of travel is the same, and
thus they offer mutual support, encouragement, and reassurance.

[slide 26 – philosophy] At university I may
have studied philosophy, but like so many other university students I obtained my
real education through social interaction. In my case, it was at the offices of
the Gauntlet, the student newspaper, where I spent more time than I ever did in
the classroom.

My most direct interaction with peer
learning communities as an educator came when I was working in the Canadian
north - the learning centre in Fort St. John, in northern British Columbia, or
the fishers' retraining centre, a block away from the urban aboriginal training
centre, fostered by the New Westminster School Division. The Sunrise Project,
based in Slave Lake, Alberta. Or the South West Indian Training centres in
Sioux Valley and Waywayseecappo, in rural Manitoba.

It is the sort of success that was
replicated across the country with the Community Access Points. This was a project
that did more than merely provide internet access, it created a common location
for people interesting in technology and computers (and blogs and Facebook).

People talk of ‘learning communities’ but strictly
speaking there is no such thing as a ‘learning community’ – save, perhaps, the
strained and artificial creations of educational institutions that try to cram
classes into collectives, creating personal relationships where none naturally
exist.

Rather, people learn in communities, and
what would make any given community a ‘learning’ community or otherwise is
whether people in the community learn more or less well. A francophone
contribution would consist of both support for online community as well as
support for peer community.

[slide 27 – grow (butterfly)] It should be
a truism today that communities are grown rather than constructed. Sharing and
learning cannot be “legislated into existence.” (Dube, Bourhis, & Jacob,
2006) The desire for autonomy comes part and parcel with some of the perceived
benefits of learning and growing in a community: safely, security, and privacy.

In the field of learning especially, there
is a great deal of attention paid to what it is members have in common that
facilitates the creation of a community – whether it be common educational
needs, common age or locale, common sets of values, or even more theoretical
entities, such as common objects, domains of discourse, or understandings.

The value of a community, however, and
especially of a learning community, comes from the diversity in the community.
Students gather around an instructor precisely because the instructor has
knowledge, beliefs and opinions that the students don’t share.

They gather around each other because they
each have unique experiences. Fostering a learning community is as much a
matter of drawing on the differences as it is a matter of underlining the
similarities.

Threats
and Opportunities

[slide 28 – global (fish)] There is both
risk and opportunity in this model for specific cultural and linguistic groups
such as the francophone community.

Provider institutions may be located
anywhere. MOOCs serve a global audience. We are seeing this trend develop
already. Even today, I see course announcements posted almost daily, on new
MOOCs rather from individual universities or via EdX or Coursera. It is now
possible to take a course on almost anything from almost anywhere in the world.

The risk is of course the same as is
created by any mass media, that the largest culture will come to dominate social
and political institutions by weight of number and prevalence on mass media.
And this is in fact what we have seen in the area of MOOCs. The language of
instruction has been until recent years almost exclusively English.

[slide 29 – francophone] One of the few
francophone MOOCs, and probably the best-known, was the MooC ITyPA (Internet :
Tout Y est Pour Apprendre) offered predominately through l’École Centrale de
Nantes (http://www.itypa.mooc.fr/node/29)
and Thot Cursus (www.cursus.edu), a french-speaking website dedicated to
education and digital culture.

The only university currently offering MOOC
in French through Coursera is the Ecole polythechnique fédérale de
Lausanne.The course introduces
students to Java programming in French. (www.coursera.org/epfl).

With my colleagues at the University of
Moncton, I will be participating in the creation of a french-language MOOC on
Open Educational Resources, to be offered in cooperation with the OIF, next
fall.

Francophone peer communities active in
global MOOCs ensure that even in Anglophone MOOCs, a francophone community and
contribution is present. But potential students are now faced with a wide range
of open online educational opportunities. My own web site, mooc.ca, lists
hundreds, maybe thousands, of open online courses.

It is not enough to offer courses and
programs online in French, in my opinion. The French language and culture
belongs in all courses and communities, even those that are predominately
English.

[slide 30 – mosaic] The MOOCs George
Siemens and I have designed and developed were explicitly designed to support
participation from a mosaic of cultures. Other, more traditional, MOOCs make it
more difficult, but the key to participation in these is to convert a static one-language
presentation-mode course into a thriving multilingual and multicultural
community.

It seems so little. What is being done to
support these groups? What resources are available, what online courses in the
French language?

Why is this important, particularly in the
context of fostering language and culture?

It is worth noting that theorists of both
professional and social networks speak of one’s interactions within the
community as a process of building, or creating, one’s own identity.

Wenger, for example, writes, “Having a
sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organizations. Consider
the annual computer drop at a semiconductor company that designs both analog
and digital circuits. The computer drop became a ritual by which the analog
community asserted its identity. Once a year, their hero would climb the
highest building on the company's campus and drop a computer, to the great
satisfaction of his peers in the analog gang. The corporate world is full of
these displays of identity, which manifest themselves in the jargon people use,
the clothes they wear, and the remarks they make.” (Wenger, 1998)

[slide 31 – identity] And meanwhile, danah
boyd, studying the social community, writes, “The dynamics of identity
production play out visibly on MySpace. Profiles are digital bodies, public
displays of identity where people can explore impression management. Because
the digital world requires people to write themselves into being, profiles
provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language,
imagery and media. Explicit reaction to their online presence offers valuable
feedback. The goal is to look cool and receive peer validation. Of course,
because imagery can be staged, it is often difficult to tell if photos are a
representation of behaviors or a re-presentation of them.” (boyd, 2006)

In both of these we are seeing aspects of
the same phenomenon. To learn is not to acquire or to accumulate, but rather,
to develop or to grow. The process of learning is a process of becoming, a
process of developing one’s own self.

We have defined three domains of learning:
the individual learner, the online community, and the peer community.

Recent discussions of MOOCs have focused
almost exclusively on the online community, with almost no discussion of the
individual learner, and no discussion peer community. But to my mind over time
all three elements will be seen to be equally important.

At university, I became not so much a
philosopher, though that was my formal education, but rather, a journalist,
which is the community I became a part of.

[slide 32 – immerse] MOOCs are communities
in which learners can immerse themselves and grow into something new. Previous
experience suggests that these will be places where they can create and where
they can project – not “serious games” but “modding communities”, not “reading
groups” but “fan fiction”, not “educational simulations” but “LAN parties”.

We might also define three key roles in online learning: the student,
the instructor, and the facilitator. The ‘instructor’ is the person responsible
for the online community, while the ‘facilitator’ is the person responsible for
the peer community.

Of course, the ‘instructor’ and the
‘facilitator’ are abstracts. We think of them as one person, but in fact these
roles are fulfilled by teams of people working together to orchestrate the
experience of community.

The talk of ‘star instructors’ without
reference to the wider facilitation is as nonsensical as talking about ‘movie
stars’ as being the entire film industry, without regard to directors, camera
operators, distributors and movie theatre managers.

The ‘star’ is yet another McGuffin – of no
great importance, but some candy designed to attract us to the event.

In traditional education, the two
communities exist as a single entity. The same institution which produces the online
instruction is also the institution attended by the student. For example, if I
say I am taking a course from the University of Calgary, what I mean is that
the course instruction is being delivered by the University of Calgary, and
also that the University of Calgary provides the facilities where I receive
that course instruction.

[slide 33 – provider] In the future, host
and provider institutions will increasingly be different institutions. One
example of this is course brokering, wherein the course I am taking may have
been developed by, and even instructed by, a University of Calgary instructor,
but is being delivered at Red Deer College. Thus, when I take the course, I use
Red Deer's classrooms, computers, and facilities even though the course is a
University of Calgary course.

The recent MOOCs offered by companies like
Coursera and Udacity have commercialized course brokering. They take a course
offered by one university and make it available to other institutions to host
in on-campus peer communities.

Of course, this is a model that the K-12
community has employed for any number of years. It is common to see a single
course taught from one location and delivered to other locations by means such
as video conferencing and interactive environments.

And, one would expect the same phenomenon
to extend into the French-language community, to see local support offered in
French-language communities for participation in online courses offered in a
variety of languages at a variety of locations around the world.

[slide 34 – discourse] But I would ask,
with equal relevance, where is the French-language community itself? Where will
I see the French-language contribution to physics and philosophy, botany and
political science? It will not be enough simply to author content and offer
courses. The place for French is in the middle of these domains, in discourse
and discussion on a global stage.

Yes, content and courses are necessary. But
what is needed more than anything is French-language participation in the
discourse itself, that idea that, for any online course, any online community,
the French culture and language has a place there, belongs there, and is
necessarily a part of that course and that community.

Comments

I share your thougts that learning experts need to learn also how to facilitate living communities... Funny that the "old" thoughts from Wenger are still the main reference. I hope that also academics will research more in this fiel. Best. Thomas

LOVE this statement, so helpful: "Rather, what we are saying through this structure is that we, the course authors, will be studying these materials. And people are welcome to come along for the ride."

Excellent read - thank you. I found this helpful in clarifying the current phenomenon of the 'wrapped MOOC' which is really not a MOOC at all - as you said they are not online, wrapped MOOCs are really a set of resources used in a traditional instructional setting. Furthermore, given that numerous resources already exist, it is most disappointing to see how schools have jumped to spend thousands of dollars for content that is already available for free through OER.

Clear and following laying bare of both the connectivist MOOC and other models that get confused with it. I keep trying to explain the differences to colleague, but not well enough. This will help. There are other good articles and posts on the differences but this is the most comprehensive without sacrificing clarity.

About the Francophone matter, what about a cooperative project with the Francophone program at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette?

Thanks Vanessa; as for the francophone project, we are about to embark on a french-langauge MOOCs for the OIF (Org. Intl. francophonie) on OERs, in which Lafayette I'm sure would be a welcome partner, and this could lead to something more.

Thanks for the excellent read. Especially clarity on the true definition of MOOCs.

If I understood correctly, MOOCs are not communities of practice (COP), however they do foster community.

In Wengers paper he mentions that “…learning can be the reason the community comes together or an incidental outcome of member's interactions”. Learning is the reason people participate in MOOCs.

I don't know if I can say this but I feel as if MOOCs are temporary COPs. 'Temporary Massive Open Online Communities". Although the communities may be forced in some sense, for the duration of the course there is a strong sense of COPs.